“Will you come with us, please?” Pulgrum gestured toward the hall.
Constance walked between them, one on each side as if ready to catch her should her knees or body fail her. At the door to the morgue, Pulgrum knocked and then entered, leaving her with Dean. He reemerged moments later and motioned them in. The odor assaulted her, gagged her. Someone held her elbow. Midway in the room, an attendant rolled a gurney into the aisle and pulled back the sheet covering the right foot.
On the bottom, just outside the arch, was what looked to all appearances to be a recent cigarette burn. The officers reached for her as Constance began to slip.
*
“Give her some time.”
The sound of the officer’s hoarse voice resonated in the depths of Constance’s paralysis. She opened her eyes. Her vision filled with the ragged repair of a cracked ceiling. Where was she? Had they put her in a cell? Did anyone know she was there? Suddenly frantic, Constance scrambled with her hands, reaching, grasping for anything. Her fingers closed on the wooden edge of whatever held her. She gripped it tight, then tighter. Something to hold her.
“Ah, she’s coming to. Fetch some water there, will you? Come now. Snap to.”
At the sound of that heavy voice again, Constance turned her head to see the narrow shape of Pulgrum towering high above her. She reached out her hand, but he did not touch her.
“Just you hold on there a minute, Mrs. Halstead. Dean is gone to get you some water. Take your time, so you don’t fall out on us again.”
Constance closed her eyes. Turned her head from side to side. Tried to wipe away the thoughts of Benton’s striking face destroyed. His eyes on hers. The look of sudden recognition. She felt the nausea rising. Swallowed hard and opened her eyes to the veined plaster of the ceiling.
“Take your time. You’ll be all right.” Pulgrum had not moved, his figure dark above her, his shadow over her face. “Ah, here’s the water, when you’re ready.”
Constance nodded. Pulgrum leaned over, slid his hard arm beneath her shoulders, and lifted her to sitting. As he shifted her feet to the floor, she recognized that she was back in the office on a narrow wooden bench, her back against the wall. She blinked at the silhouette of Dean as he tentatively offered the water. She took it and sipped, then drank. Laid her head back against the wall.
What did they know? Everything? Nothing? What would they ask? And what could she say? A thousand thoughts swirled in her head before she opened her eyes again and nodded. Pulgrum took one elbow; Dean the other. Once on her feet, she felt her strength returning. They released their hold, and she stood on her own, but they hovered close, too close, in case. She stumbled to the chair on her own.
“We need to ask some questions, ma’am.” The voice was Pulgrum’s.
“Then ask,” she said after a moment. There was nothing more to avoid.
“Mrs. Halstead, are you familiar with Storyville?” he asked.
She felt the shock of it, the unsuspected jolt of it.
“Of course,” she said. “Who in New Orleans would not know a whole quarter legitimized for prostitution and crime?”
“And gambling?”
“Gambling? Oh, yes. Of course.”
“Was your husband a gambler, Mrs. Halstead?”
She hesitated. “I’m sure he made his bets, Officer, like most men I know.”
“Horses? Cards?”
“Cards.” She looked up at him. “He liked to play.”
“And did he win or lose, ma’am?”
“I’m sure some of both, Officer. Why?”
Pulgrum hitched himself onto the corner of the desk. Dean fidgeted.
“Are you familiar with the Black Hand, Mrs. Halstead?”
“I know it exists.”
“You know it exists? Nothing more?”
“I know its reputation for evil. And violence.”
“And murder?”
“Yes, and murder.” She shook her head. The memory of Benton’s rage as he left the table. The sudden blur of the man ramming past as Benton lost his footing.
“We found this on your husband’s body, Mrs. Halstead. Water-soaked in his pocket. It took some time and some doing to try to separate the various papers and get them dried. We put them together as best we could, like some sort of jigsaw. Quite a challenge. All blurred and run together, or washed away completely. But this is what we’ve managed to assemble.” He pointed to the desk. “Are you strong enough to rise?”
Constance nodded. Took her time, holding the arm of the chair to be sure. Then stepped toward she knew not what.
On a portable flat wooden tray on the desk lay some assembled pieces of smeared paper. There was little there to make sense of. But she stared. Then looked at Pulgrum for explanation.
“What do you see there, Mrs. Halstead? Anything familiar?”
She shook her head. She wanted to touch it, move those fragments of ruined paper, force them to make sense.
“We believe it to be a threat from the Black Hand. We believe your husband was heavy into the cards with them and owed them gambling debts he could not pay. We have reason to believe he was a frequenter of Storyville. Would you know anything about that, ma’am?”
“Prostitutes?” The word came out loud enough to shock Constance, even as she uttered it. She shook her head. “I can’t imagine.” She envisioned Benton and his almost wooden approach to sex. The idea of Benton with prostitutes almost made her laugh. His interest in making love had seemed about equal to his interest in tending a garden.
Early in their marriage she had blamed herself. Had bought the most beguiling nightgowns she could find. Had paraded herself before him with her wrapper off one shoulder and loose about her torso, only to have him walk from the room for some business detail he had forgotten. Hurt by his lack of response, she had blamed her lack of feminine beauty, her small breasts, her flat hips. It was a wonder she had ever had three babies—those infrequent, impromptu conjugal completions that had left her wanting and unsatisfied, but with child. Perhaps it was her body. Why had he chosen her and not some buxom girl? Yet though he was invariably polite and charming to such women, she had never sensed him flirting.
“Prostitutes.” She repeated the word almost in mockery.
“No, ma’am. We’ve no evidence of that, though a man might be a man regardless. No, that’s not what gets a man in deep in Storyville. It’s the gambling. And if a man can’t pay, then—”
“Then what?”
“Then a note of threat, like this. If you examine the lower right, all pieced together there, it takes on the distorted outline of a hand. A black hand, we believe.”
Constance thought of the odd man she had seen outside her fence. The set faces of those gamblers. Benton’s urgent demands for money, the money from her trust, which she had refused to give him, which she had the right to refuse and which he could not take, because of Louisiana’s Napoleonic law, which protected her. The papers she had seen him pull furtively from his pocket, stuff back in again in anger as he left that fateful morning.
“Would your husband have been susceptible to suicide, Mrs. Halstead?”
“Suicide?” The word stunned her, sent her cold. She shook her head.
“We wonder if he may have jumped from the train, Mrs. Halstead. He was over his head in debt to the Black Hand. It’s in our list of possibilities.”
Constance sank into the chair. In her mind the scene played in slow motion. She saw his eyes, his recognition, the blur of motion, that man, and Benton in the air, the black water beneath him.
“Mrs. Halstead?” Pulgrum’s voice wrenched her back into the room. “It might have only been an accident, you know. It’s entirely possible that is all it is.” He tapped his fingers on the desk. “We are done for now, Mrs. Halstead.”
Would he ever stop saying her name? This name that sent a wave of horror through her.
“Officer Dean will see you home, ma’am. We will keep you notified, of course, and will make arrangements for the release of your husband’s body when we close the investigation.”
Constance was at the door when Pulgrum spoke again.
“Mrs. Halstead.”